Herzog by Saul Bellow

If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. He had fallen under the spell of writing letters that he never sent. He was alone in the big old house in the Berkshires, overcome by the need to explain, to clarify, to have it out in the kind of effortlessly superior, macho prose that would become the hallmark of his acolytes.

What was his character? Narcissistic, masochistic, too knowingly un-self-aware. Well, that was Bellow. But what of him? He had been a bad husband, a bad father, a bad academic; he had failed at everything. His wife, his ex-wife Madeleine, had made him spend his $20,000 inheritance on moving from the Berkshires to Chicago and then she had left him for his friend, his ex-friend Valentine. Why had he been the last to suspect their affair?

He had gone alone to Europe to save the marriage and had only the embarrassment of an infection from Wanda for his trouble. On his return, Madeleine had thrown him out for the one-legged charmer and he had not even put up a fight to get custody of their daughter, Junie.

There was Ramona, of course, but she was merely his sexual reflex. True, she was extremely attractive, in her late 30s and gagging for his balding, unfit late-40s body in the way that balding, unfit late-40s male authors often like to imagine. But he was not ready to get married again.

It was hard to concentrate. You know the feeling.

Dear Martin Luther King, Dear Mr Shapiro, I hope you don't mind if I riff on civil rights, Romanticism and the nature of Soviet communism. Dear Mr Bellow, Your erudition is exemplary, but where exactly is this getting us?

The lawyer had told him he was a mensch, not an egghead. You could have fooled me. He was a good Jew; he was born to suffer. But not to inflict it on the rest of us. He didn't want to die. He would sell up and come to New York, though first he would stay with an old girlfriend, Libbie. The journey would allow him a lot of time to think about death.

Dear Libbie, I have to go. I can't stand the kindness.

Herzog flew back to New York to find a letter from a former student, Geraldine Portnoy. I was walking past the house and noticed Valentine had left Junie locked in the car. Hmm, he thought. As a plot device this was distinctly average, but it was better than anything else on offer and it did allow him an uneasy segue into a lengthy rumination on his first wife Daisy and their son Marco and Madey's brief dalliance with Catholicism. Trust him to get involved with someone more fucked-up than a Jew!

Ramona invited him to flirt with the Orphic. Why was he here? A question not only he was asking by now. "I belong to you," Ramona said while making love. He was good in bed. Very good. They tried to make you think you were old, but you are youthful, Bellow reassured himself.

He dropped her at work and went to see his lawyer. A sense of melancholy swept over him at the courthouse as he saw a mother accused of killing her child. He had to go to Chicago to see Junie. He had to make sense of his own mother's death and the World as Will.

Dear Dr Nobel, I've tried to cover all the bases for The Great Novel. Je n'ai jamais ecrit en français ... Rachatz. And Yiddish. Can I have the prize now? Dear Mr Bellow, Just hang in there.

His body was rotting from the inside. Why were his brothers successful and he was down to $600? Why had he let the bitch torture him? He stopped by Tante Taube's house to collect the old pistol with which his father had threatened to shoot him when he'd asked to borrow money. Reconciliation then death; from madhouse to mausoleum.

Herzog pulled up outside the bitch's house. He saw how tenderly Valentine bathed Junie. Firing the pistol was nothing but an idea of Bergsonian duration. He would take Junie to the aquarium instead. The brakes were stiff and the Falcon careered across the road. Herzog checked to see Junie was OK before remembering how he had crashed in the very road in which he had been sexually abused by a tramp when he was 10.

Dear Mr Bellow, There was no need to throw in the kitchen sink.

"What's with the pistol?" the two negro cops asked.

"It was going to be a paperweight," he replied.

"He was going to kill me," said the Bitch, dripping bitchness.

His brother posted the bail bond and dropped him at the house in the Berkshires. This had to end, Herzog thought. Enough solipsistic kvetching. Too right. He did not need happiness or meaning; history is cruelty; existence is meaning. His house may not be much, but it was enough.